That was my plan. But there is an old saying about plans and war. I would have done well to heed it. - Alastair Reynolds

Don't you agree with me?" "On some distant theoretical level, just possibly.

I'm just saying...we can't trust them. We've never been able to trust them. That's always been a cornerstone of our operational policy." "Then maybe it's time we got a new cornerstone. They're people, Lillian. They might be people who make us uncomfortable, people with very different values from ours, but when we're facing local extinction at the hands of a genocidal machine intelligence, I don't think the differences between us look massively significant, do you?

We have all made mistakes. The mark of intelligence is to learn from them, and not be bound by the errors of the past.